‘I’ve got a team assembled, boss,’ DC McAndrew responded, ‘and we’ve broken down the area into sectors. We’ll be onto it this afternoon.’
‘The next question is why did she choose Matthews and Reid? Were they picked at random or deliberately selected? The killer might have seen Matthews around and learned his habits and peccadilloes. But Reid was much younger and appears to have been relatively new to the scene. If he was selected deliberately, it would have to have been done by more subtle means. They were both family men, which could be an important link, but they moved in very different circles and were at very different stages of their family lives – Matthews had four kids of teen age and up, Reid had one baby daughter.’
‘They must have found her online. These days if you want a blowjob, you just Google it, right?’ chipped in DC Sanderson to muted chuckles.
‘Probably, so let’s check out Reid’s and Matthews’ digital footprint. DC Grounds, perhaps you could coordinate? Let’s find out if these guys were deliberately targeted or just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Everybody clear?’
Helen was on her feet, marching back into the incident room. She was filled with energy and determination – a real sense of purpose. But as she crossed the office floor, she suddenly stopped dead, her newfound optimism dissipating in an instant. Somebody had left the TV on mute, the set playing silently to itself in the corner, but now Helen hurriedly grabbed the remote control and turned up the volume. It was the lunchtime news bulletin on BBC South. Graham Wilson, the regular anchor, was conducting an in-depth interview. And his studio guest today was Eileen Matthews.
Helen burned with anger and frustration as she raced to the Matthews residence. Eileen was desperate with grief – Helen understood that – but her direct intervention into the investigation risked sabotaging everything. Eileen had made up her mind that Alan was not involved with prostitutes and, convinced that the police were barking up the wrong tree, had decided to instigate her own hunt for her husband’s killer. ‘Please help me find the man who did this to Alan’ was a phrase she had repeated several times during the interview. Man, man, man. Five minutes of lunchtime TV had now set the public hunting for a killer that didn’t exist.
Eileen had only just returned home from the TV studio when Helen arrived. She was visibly drained by the experience of talking publicly about her husband’s death and wanted to shut the door on Helen, but Helen was too enraged to allow that. It didn’t take long for hostilities to start.
